Most of the lakes in the north country were shallow, scooped out by ancient glaciers, rarely over fifteen or twenty feet deep, and if the wind didn’t come up it was like sleeping in a cradle. Usually, out on the water a way, the mosquitoes were not much of a bother. It was late summer now and they were not as bad as they are in the first part of the year, when driven by the need to hunt and get blood and lay eggs before fall. In the first hatch in summer Brian had seen swarms so bad they plugged his nostrils—lord, how he’d hated them when he’d first crawled ashore from the plane crash. They had torn him apart.
Dark was coming now and he made sure the fire was out, loaded his gear back in the canoe and paddled out offshore a hundred yards. Here he stopped the canoe and drifted for a few minutes, checking the weather. But the sunset was beautifully calm, serene, and not a breath of wind, and he nodded and slid the hook over the side until it hit the bottom, then back-paddled until it bit, tied it off to his bowline and arranged his bed to sleep on top of his bag because the air was still warm and mellow. He lay down to rest, listening to the evening cry of loons calling to each other across the mirrored water.
A perfect day among many perfect days and the last thought he had before slipping into sleep was that he was in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time in his life.
Perfect.
A strange sound awakened him.
He had been sleeping hard, dreaming, of all things, about Kay-gwa-daush and beauty marks, and at first his body did not want to come up into consciousness.
But so much of him was tuned now to reacting to odd things, a line that did not belong where it was, a sound that should not be there, an odd color or smell. He had almost gone crazy on his last visit back to civilization. Sirens and stink of smoke and bangs and rattles and noise—it had all meshed together and desensitized him to the point where he’d heard nothing because it was so overwhelming.
Here, now, every odd sound or color or line or smell meant something. He had watched wolves hunting once and they would trot or walk along and stop every few feet and look and smell and listen and they checked everything out.
Everything.
Any little rustle in the grass, any soft whisper of sound, every scent.
And now here he lay, awake, knowing only that a strange noise had cut him out of sleep but not what sound or where it had come from and he opened his mouth to clear his ears and held his breath and waited, listening.
The night was perfectly still. The temperature had dropped so that he had without awakening pulled his unzipped bag over the top of him to stay warm, and it was cool enough that even the odd mosquito had gone down and it was so quiet he heard his heart beating in his ears.
But no other sound.
The moon was half full and seemed close enough to touch and made it so bright the lake around him could be seen easily. The canoe rode softly on the slick water, the little anchor still holding well. Nothing wrong there.
He sat up a bit. Nothing on the shore that he could see; of course it was far enough away—a good hundred yards—that even with the bright moon he might not see something small.
But no, nothing. No sound, not even bugs, not even a loon.
And yet he was awake. Why? He trusted his instincts implicitly here in the bush and he knew there had to have been something, some big or little thing. The dream was not enough to wake him. There had to be some outside influence involved. But he could hear or see nothing. . . .
Wait. There.
A sound. What was it? Very soft, so that he could just barely hear it, and there again, soft, whimpering. . . .
A whine. A soft whimpering whine the way a dog might sound if it was begging or injured.
A dog?
Now he sat and scoured the bank but could see nothing. A coyote, perhaps, brush wolf as they called them up north, or maybe a timber wolf, two wolves, one begging from the other.
He had a small monocular in his pack. Binocu-lars were too heavy but there were times when he wanted to see things from a distance without disturbing them—he was especially interested in the eagle nests on many of the lakes because he wanted to see the young but didn’t want to get too close to them.
He took out the monocular and studied the lakeshore. It was only eight power, but it pulled in a lot of extra light from the moon and he broke the shoreline down into sections and tried to see the wolf or coyote. Or maybe it was a fox.
But there couldn’t be a dog out here, could there?
He saw nothing on the first sweep. He looked at the moon and was thinking it was probably two or three in the morning and perhaps he should just accept that it was a coyote or wolf or maybe even a small bear and get some more sleep when he heard it again.
Not louder, but somehow more persistent, perhaps a little longer in duration.
He started another sweep and was halfway through his swing, carefully studying the shoreline foot by foot, when he came to the area where he had made a fire and cooked the northern. And then he saw it.
By the log where he had lain back after eating there was a shape. Not moving, just sitting or hulking, not a coyote but certainly not as big as a wolf either.
A dark shape that might be a small bear—there were many bears in the bush, blacks, some of them cinnamon-colored blacks, and worthy of much respect. He had had a couple of run-ins, one with a bear that he had come close to shooting, another with a bear that had tried to move into his winter shelter and had been driven off by a skunk. But this didn’t look quite like a bear either.
Now it moved, stood slowly, and he saw that it had four legs, was slightly larger than a coyote, had a shiny patch on its shoulder, and unless he was completely insane was almost assuredly a dog.
Out here.
And looking at Brian across the water whining, whimpering.
Well, he thought. Just that. Well.
I might as well go see what it wants.
He sat up, completely awake now, and fetched the anchor line from the bow rope and pulled the little grapnel up and paddled toward shore.
Close on he stopped, forty feet from the bank, sixty from the dog, and studied it again. Rabies was a very real disease and while it usually killed the infected animals before they could go far or do much damage, he didn’t want to get torn up or killed if the dog was rabid.
He used the monocular again, even this close, because it gathered so much light, and scrutinized the animal. When he had paddled in the dog had come closer to the shore to meet him, but it moved poorly and seemed to favor its right side. Brian held the scope on it to see what was wrong.
It was most certainly a dog—he could see it was a female even in the dark—a nondescript kind of dark-haired malamute cross that the Crees sometimes had in their camps to pull sleds in the winter or pack in the summer. They were not so much sled dogs as just camp dogs and companions that pulled sleds when necessary. And this one seemed friendly enough, wanting to greet him. The dog had that shiny place on her shoulder but otherwise its coat was a dark brown.
And then she turned and Brian saw the shiny spot better and realized that the dog had been wounded in some way, perhaps in a fight, and there was a slash that started just at the top of her right shoulder and went down and back at an angle almost to her rear end. It had bled all down her side, and much of the blood had clotted, but in the moonlight Brian could see the shine of fresh blood.
“Oh man,” Brian said aloud, his voice almost startling him because he so rarely spoke, “what in god’s name happened to you?”
And the dog whimpered to him again in a sound that it seemed dogs reserved just for talking to humans, a soft asking sound, a soul sound, and Brian dug the paddle in and slipped up onshore to help.
When the dog saw the canoe move toward shore she at first moved to meet it, head down, tail wagging, but Brian hesitated just once more before touching the bank with the bow of the canoe.
This was all very strange, and strange things in the bush often deserved more study. The dog was here, she greeted Brian as a friend, but why? Why a dog? Why was it here? Was there more to it, more people here, something possibly not good waiting for him on the bank?
But he waited just a few seconds because when he was this close the dog first sat, whimpering with pain, and then lay down on her good side with the wound up and waited, just waited for Brian.
It was enough and he pushed up on the bank and jumped out of the canoe. He went to the dog and knelt next to her.
Of course it was still dark but there was the halfmoon and he saw that most of the wound, a foot-and-a-half-long rip down the side, was very superficial, just breaking and peeling back the skin, and it had clotted well. Here and there wet blood oozed but even as he watched, it seemed to diminish.
Still, it needed tending to and to do that he needed light, a fire.
“You stay here,” he told the dog. “I have to get wood and make a fire.”
Either because she understood or perhaps just that she was in pain, the dog stayed by the front of the canoe while Brian moved in the moonlight and found dead wood and dry grass and started a small fire nearby.
He took a burning stick and held it closer to see better and it frightened the dog. “Easy, easy, I have to see it. . . .”
He put his hand on the dog’s head and she settled immediately, responding to the soothing sound of his voice. Brian held the light up again and in the relative brightness saw that the rip, however it had been caused, had torn back a flap of shoulder skin about half as big as his palm.
He could see exposed flesh, muscle. Although the meat was not too damaged he knew he would have to fix it in some way, cover it.
“Or sew it up,” he said aloud. “I have some fishing line and a needle. I wonder if you would let me sew the flap down?”
He went to the canoe and got out his sewing repair kit. He had thread there but thought it might be too light for the job, would pull out. The fishing line would work better except that he would have to use the large needle with it.
This, he thought, moving back to the dog, could go wrong in so many ways. She wasn’t a really large dog—perhaps forty pounds—but she had teeth and Brian had seen dogs fight in the city and had seen wolves kill deer and knew what those teeth could do. He’d read somewhere that the teeth at the back, the molars, even in a moderate dog could come down with twenty-six hundred pounds per square inch. The cross section of the bone in my arm, he thought, is about a square inch. Hmmmm.
Still, he couldn’t leave the wound that way.
“I have to hurt you,” he said to the dog, petting her head. “I’m sorry, but we have to sew that up. I’ll talk and tell you what I’m doing but if we don’t sew it and cover it the flies will plant eggs in it. . . .”
All the time he was talking he was preparing himself, kneeling by the dog, threading the fish line through the needle in the firelight—in itself no mean feat—and hoping his talk would soothe the dog.
“I’m going to clean the wound with a little water,” he said, dipping water from the lake. He knew it wasn’t hygienic but the wound was full of dirt and grass and the water was cleaner than that. He thought of boiling it but then he would have to wait for it to cool and that would take too long. The dog was steady now but might not hold for a long time.
He washed the wound with water as best he could, splashing it gently until the water ran clear without blood or dirt and then folded the flap of skin back up over the wound opening and was dismayed to find that it was too small to cover the space.
It lacked a quarter inch all around, seemed to have shrunk. He would have to pull it and stretch it back while he sewed.
He winced, thinking how it would feel to do it to himself—first stretch his skin and then pull a large needle with fish line through it, again, and again. The dog had remained quiet while he washed and pulled the flap back over—quieter than Brian would have believed—but he did not believe she would lie still for what was coming.
“It’s more of a problem than I thought,” Brian said. “Maybe going to hurt a little more . . .” Later, much later, he would remember talking to the dog that first night as if she were a person and would not think it odd, never thought it odd. He talked to all animals, deer, birds, wolves, sometimes even fish. But only the dog seemed to understand, seemed to know what he meant.
Well, he thought, here goes, and he pulled the flap, had to tug it sharply into place and took the first stitch with the needle, surprised at how hard he had to push to get the needle through the skin. It was almost like cured leather and he had to exert way more force than he thought the dog would tolerate, just for the first edge. Then he had to pull and tug the flap of skin into position and push the needle through the second edge, again, having to push very hard to get even the sharp needle through the hide, then pull the two edges together with the string and tie a first knot to hold it, then move a quarter inch—which seemed about right—and push-pull it through again. . . .
And again.
And again.
And talking all the while, waiting for the dog to come around and hit him.
“You’re such a tough dog.
I
couldn’t take this, I know. You must have good genes, tough genes, a tough mother and a tough father, to take this pulling and pushing and poking and just keep taking it and taking it. . . .” His voice even and smooth, trying to calm the dog, ease her mind.
And not once did the head come around. Only at first, when Brian jerked the string to pull the two edges together, was there a reaction, a low, deep rumble from the dog’s chest and the head coming up, but it was not a growl so much as a moan and the head never came around, the teeth never bared. The dog just looked at him, looked right in Brian’s eyes in the firelight, a look of understanding, of complete and utter trust, and then the head went back down and there were no more rumbles, no more moans, no more glances. She lay there with her eyes closed, content to let Brian work. Almost relaxed.